Good point, Child. In the book, Frodo may *look* like a young hobbit just out of his tweens, but he thinks like a fifty-year-old - he has more life experience than the others. I don't think it was seventeen years in the film, though we weren't told. *Nobody* looked older, for a start. We saw Gandalf heading for the Minas Tirith Municipal Library or whatever, doing his research and then, presumably, galloping back. I very much doubt he left it for seventeen years. This is the way films work - if a sign came up saying "seventeen years later" the audience members who hadn't read the novel would ask, "Why?" It's presumably also the reason why film Frodo didn't mess around with selling off Bag End or waiting for his birthday, he just went.<P>You're right about the differfence it made to the relationships between the characters. I doubt, also, that a modern cinema audience could handle the master/servant relationship, although there was enough of it for the purposes of the film. Sam was unquestionably a peasant, from beginning to end, even if he did go to the pub with his employer. Come to that, in the extended version of FOTR, there was Frodo buying drinks for the local peasants in the pub ... would the hobbit equivalent of the squire do that? Well, maybe. :-)
|